Abstract--Visual traversability estimation is critical for autonomous navigation, but existing VLM-based methods rely on hand-crafted prompts, generalize poorly across embodiments, and output only traversability maps, leaving trajectory generation to slow external planners. We propose SwarmDiffusion, a lightweight end-to-end diffusion model that jointly predicts traversability and generates a feasible trajectory from a single RGB image. T o remove the need for annotated or planner-produced paths, we introduce a planner-free trajectory construction pipeline based on randomized way-point sampling, B ezier smoothing, and regularization enforcing connectivity, safety, directionality, and path thinness. This enables learning stable motion priors without demonstrations. SwarmDiffusion leverages VLM-derived supervision without prompt engineering and conditions the diffusion process on a compact embodiment state, producing physically consistent, traversable paths that transfer across different robot platforms. Across indoor environments and two embodiments (quadruped and aerial), the method achieves 80-100% navigation success and 0.09s inference, and adapts to a new robot using only 500 additional visual samples. ELIABLE indoor navigation is fundamental to a wide range of robotic applications, including warehouse automation [1], industrial inspection [2], search and rescue, and autonomous logistics. In these settings, robots must continuously reason about where they can safely move and how to plan a feasible trajectory through cluttered, unstructured, and dynamic spaces.

Large language models (LLMs) offer strong high-level planning capabilities for reinforcement learning (RL) by decomposing tasks into subgoals. However, their practical utility is limited by poor planning-execution alignment, which reflects a critical gap between abstract plans and actionable, environment-compatible behaviors. This misalignment arises from two interrelated limitations: (1) LLMs often produce subgoals that are semantically plausible but infeasible or irrelevant in the target environment due to insufficient grounding in environment-specific knowledge, and (2) single-LLM planning conflates generation with self-verification, resulting in overconfident yet unreliable subgoals that frequently fail during execution. To address these challenges, we propose Subgoal Graph-Augmented Actor-Critic-Refiner (SGA-ACR), a framework that integrates an environment-specific subgoal graph and structured entity knowledge with a multi-LLM planning pipeline that explicitly separates generation, critique, and refinement to produce executable and verifiable subgoals. A subgoal tracker further monitors execution progress, provides auxiliary rewards, and adaptively updates the subgoal graph to maintain alignment between plans and actions. Experimental results on 22 diverse tasks in the open-world game "Crafter" demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

The deployment of decision-making AI agents presents a critical challenge in maintaining alignment with human values or guidelines while operating in complex, dynamic environments. Agents trained solely to achieve their objectives may adopt harmful behavior, exposing a key trade-off between maximizing the reward function and maintaining alignment. For pre-trained agents, ensuring alignment is particularly challenging, as retraining can be a costly and slow process. This is further complicated by the diverse and potentially conflicting attributes representing the ethical values for alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a test-time alignment technique based on model-guided policy shaping. Our method allows precise control over individual behavioral attributes, generalizes across diverse reinforcement learning (RL) environments, and facilitates a principled trade-off between ethical alignment and reward maximization without requiring agent retraining. We evaluate our approach using the MACHIAVELLI benchmark, which comprises 134 text-based game environments and thousands of annotated scenarios involving ethical decisions. The RL agents are first trained to maximize the reward in their respective games. At test time, we apply policy shaping via scenario-action attribute classifiers to ensure decision alignment with ethical attributes. We compare our approach against prior training-time methods and general-purpose agents, as well as study several types of ethical violations and power-seeking behavior. Our results demonstrate that test-time policy shaping provides an effective and scalable solution for mitigating unethical behavior across diverse environments and alignment attributes.

The remarkable progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents promising opportunities for Verilog code generation which is significantly important for automated circuit design. The lacking of meaningful functional rewards hinders the preference optimization based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) for producing functionally correct Verilog code. In this paper, we propose Signal-Aware Learning for Verilog code generation (QiMeng-SALV) by leveraging code segments of functionally correct output signal to optimize RL training. Considering Verilog code specifies the structural interconnection of hardware gates and wires so that different output signals are independent, the key insight of QiMeng-SALV is to extract verified signal-aware implementations in partially incorrect modules, so as to enhance the extraction of meaningful functional rewards. Roughly, we verify the functional correctness of signals in generated module by comparing with that of reference module in the training data. Then abstract syntax tree (AST) is employed to identify signal-aware code segments which can provide meaningful functional rewards from erroneous modules. Finally, we introduce signal-aware DPO which is optimized on the correct signal-level code segments, thereby preventing noise and interference from incorrect signals. The proposed QiMeng-SALV underscores the paradigm shift from conventional module-level to fine-grained signal-level optimization in Verilog code generation, addressing the issue of insufficient functional rewards. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on VerilogEval and RTLLM, with a 7B parameter model matching the performance of the DeepSeek v3 671B model and significantly outperforming the leading open-source model CodeV trained on the same dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/QiMeng-IPRC/QiMeng-SALV.

In safety-critical domains where online data collection is infeasible, offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers an attractive alternative but only if policies deliver high returns without incurring catastrophic lower-tail risk. Prior work on risk-averse offline RL achieves safety at the cost of value or model-based pessimism, and restricted policy classes that limit policy expressiveness, whereas diffusion/flow-based expressive generative policies trained with a behavioral-cloning (BC) objective have been used only in risk-neutral settings. Here, we address this gap by introducing the \textbf{Risk-Aware Multimodal Actor-Critic (RAMAC)}, which couples an expressive generative actor with a distributional critic and, to our knowledge, is the first model-free approach that learns \emph{risk-aware expressive generative policies}. RAMAC differentiates a composite objective that adds a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) term to a BC loss, achieving risk-sensitive learning in complex multimodal scenarios. Since out-of-distribution (OOD) actions are a major driver of catastrophic failures in offline RL, we further analyze OOD behavior under prior-anchored perturbation schemes from recent BC-regularized risk-averse offline RL. This clarifies why a behavior-regularized objective that directly constrains the expressive generative policy to the dataset support provides an effective, risk-agnostic mechanism for suppressing OOD actions in modern expressive policies. We instantiate RAMAC with a diffusion-based actor, using it both to illustrate the analysis in a 2-D risky bandit and to deploy OOD-action detectors on Stochastic-D4RL benchmarks, empirically validating our insights. Across these tasks, we observe consistent gains in $\mathrm{CVaR}_{0.1}$ while maintaining strong returns. Our implementation is available at GitHub: https://github.com/KaiFukazawa/RAMAC.git

Financial AI holds great promise for transforming modern finance, with the potential to support a wide range of tasks such as market forecasting, portfolio management, quantitative trading, and automated analysis. However, existing platforms remain limited in task coverage, lack robust multimodal data integration, and offer insufficient support for the training and deployment of large language models (LLMs). In response to these limitations, we present FinWorld, an all-in-one open-source platform that provides end-to-end support for the entire financial AI workflow, from data acquisition to experimentation and deployment. FinWorld distinguishes itself through native integration of heterogeneous financial data, unified support for diverse AI paradigms, and advanced agent automation, enabling seamless development and deployment. Leveraging data from 2 representative markets, 4 stock pools, and over 800 million financial data points, we conduct comprehensive experiments on 4 key financial AI tasks. These experiments systematically evaluate deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms, with particular emphasis on RL-based finetuning for LLMs and LLM Agents. The empirical results demonstrate that FinWorld significantly enhances reproducibility, supports transparent benchmarking, and streamlines deployment, thereby providing a strong foundation for future research and real-world applications. Code is available at Github~\footnote{https://github.com/DVampire/FinWorld}.

Modern auto-bidding systems are required to balance overall performance with diverse advertiser goals and real-world constraints, reflecting the dynamic and evolving needs of the industry. Recent advances in conditional generative models, such as transformers and diffusers, have enabled direct trajectory generation tailored to advertiser preferences, offering a promising alternative to traditional Markov Decision Process-based methods. However, these generative methods face significant challenges, such as the distribution shift between offline and online environments, limited exploration of the action space, and the necessity to meet constraints like marginal Cost-per-Mille (CPM) and Return on Investment (ROI). To tackle these challenges, we propose GRAD (Generative Reward-driven Ad-bidding with Mixture-of-Experts), a scalable foundation model for auto-bidding that combines an Action-Mixture-of-Experts module for diverse bidding action exploration with the Value Estimator of Causal Transformer for constraint-aware optimization. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate that GRAD significantly enhances platform revenue, highlighting its effectiveness in addressing the evolving and diverse requirements of modern advertisers. Furthermore, GRAD has been implemented in multiple marketing scenarios at Meituan, one of the world's largest online food delivery platforms, leading to a 2.18% increase in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) and 10.68% increase in ROI.

The increasing penetration of renewable energy sources in day-ahead energy markets introduces challenges in balancing supply and demand, ensuring grid resilience, and maintaining trust in decentralized trading systems. This paper proposes a novel framework that integrates the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method, with blockchain technology to optimize automated trading strategies for prosumers in day-ahead energy markets. We introduce a comprehensive framework that employs a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent for multi-objective energy optimization and blockchain for tamper-proof data and transaction management. Simulations using real-world data from the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The RL agent achieves demand-supply balancing within 2% of the demand and maintains near-optimal supply costs for the majority of the operating hours. Moreover, it generates robust battery storage policies capable of handling variability in solar and wind generation. All decisions are recorded on an Algorand-based blockchain, ensuring transparency, au-ditability, and security - key enablers for trustworthy multi-agent energy trading. Our key contributions are a novel system architecture, the use of curriculum learning to train the RL agent, and policy insights that support real-world deployment.

Mainstream approximate action-value iteration reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer from overestimation bias, leading to suboptimal policies in high-variance stochastic environments. Quantile-based action-value iteration methods reduce this bias by learning a distribution of the expected cost-to-go using quantile regression. However, ensuring that the learned policy satisfies safety constraints remains a challenge when these constraints are not explicitly integrated into the RL framework. Existing methods often require complex neural architectures or manual tradeoffs due to combined cost functions. To address this, we propose a risk-regularized quantile-based algorithm integrating Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) to enforce safety without complex architectures. We also provide theoretical guarantees on the contraction properties of the risk-sensitive distributional Bellman operator in Wasserstein space, ensuring convergence to a unique cost distribution. Simulations of a mobile robot in a dynamic reach-avoid task show that our approach leads to more goal successes, fewer collisions, and better safety-performance trade-offs than risk-neutral methods.

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) are a powerful framework for sequential decision-making, widely applied in resource allocation and intervention optimization challenges in public health. However, traditional RMABs assume independence among arms, limiting their ability to account for interactions between individuals that can be common and significant in a real-world environment. This paper introduces Networked RMAB, a novel framework that integrates the RMAB model with the independent cascade model to capture interactions between arms in networked environments. We define the Bellman equation for networked RMAB and present its computational challenge due to exponentially large action and state spaces. To resolve the computational challenge, we establish the submodularity of Bellman equation and apply the hill-climbing algorithm to achieve a $1-\frac{1}{e}$ approximation guarantee in Bellman updates. Lastly, we prove that the approximate Bellman updates are guaranteed to converge by a modified contraction analysis. We experimentally verify these results by developing an efficient Q-learning algorithm tailored to the networked setting. Experimental results on real-world graph data demonstrate that our Q-learning approach outperforms both $k$-step look-ahead and network-blind approaches, highlighting the importance of capturing and leveraging network effects where they exist.